Bill's Blog, 5/11/11 "Wait, Did he say pool"

[bduddy]

Originally Posted by Billfred

I've got a better idea...

Standard FRC match cycle is six minutes, start to start--that means that, in a 2:15 match, the field is hot only 37.5% of the time. If those matches went to three full minutes, and the match cycle expanded to seven minutes, then the hot-field percentage goes to 42.9%. 3:15 and seven-minute cycle? 46.4%. For the same amount of time spent doing load-out, reset, load-in, and introductions, you get that much more time of the game being played.

Robot wouldn't run for that long, you say? Imagine if your matches were three minutes, but your robot only ran for two minutes. Just like the real world, you can't run your machinery around the clock--maintenance, repair, slow business, constraints on supply from upstream, operator rest periods, and so on all conspire to limit how much a piece of machinery can actually run. So with a time limit on each robot, you now have an additional layer of coordination necessary to achieve game objectives.

It wouldn't work for all games--Lunacy would be awful with this scenario--but it could afford FIRST some flexibility in scheduling (or even some other objectives; imagine if robots above 110 pounds had a one-second delay in activation in the middle of the match.)

I was thinking a related idea. Four robots per alliance - matches of 4:30. Budget four minutes between matches, and each team will have roughly the same number of matches as before. I was also thinking of having one robot off the field at all times, so the field would not be so crowded... teams could also change batteries/etc. while their robot was off the field.